Tuesday, January 19, 2010

A million stories

Read, listen and watch coverage coming out of the catastrophe in Haiti and you quickly realize there are as many different stories as there are reporters.

At least two journalists who’ve been writing and reporting on Haiti will be talking with Grady health and medical journalism students this semester.

NPR health policy reporter Joanne Silberner was supposed to be with us tomorrow, but late last week she boarded a plane with an Atlanta-based medical relief team. Narrowly avoiding a mid-air collision over Port-au-Prince, the team was sidelined in Turks and Caicos before they finally set foot in Haiti.

Joanne promises to stay safe and reschedule for later in the semester.An entirely different view comes from Deborah Blum, a Grady College graduate and Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who teaches science journalism at the University of Wisconsin. On the January 15 op-ed page of the New York Times, she wrote a powerful and poetic essay about the dangerous inner life of our planet and the possibility of predicting earthquakes.

Watching television coverage of Haiti today, I’m reminded of reports of rapes and murders in the Super Dome. While people died there, of injury and neglect, the savagery proved largely fictitious. Someday we may look back on Haitians labeled as “looters” and see only desperate people, out of options and desperate to feed their families.

If journalists don’t get it right the first time, at least we have another chance tomorrow.

9 Comments:

There are certainly a lot of details like that to take into consideration. That is a great point to bring up. I offer the thoughts above as general inspiration but clearly there are questions like the one you bring up where the most important thing will be working in honest good faith. I don?t know if best practices have emerged around things like that, but I am sure that your job is clearly identified as a fair game. Both boys and girls feel the impact of just a moment’s pleasure, for the rest of their lives. Shootaliberal.comKinoshita-toshiyuki.netHost4gains.com

An interesting discussion is worth comment. I think that you should write more on this topic, it might not be a taboo subject but generally people are not enough to speak on such topics. To the next. Cheers

Grady College's Health & Medical Journalism Masters program at University of Georgia prepares reporters to write accurate, timely, interesting and credible articles about health and medical news for various audiences. Basic newswriting skills are required, and it helps to have a spirit of adventure. Students receive hands-on training by exploring and reporting health issues impacting various counties in Northeast Georgia.